Joe Palca

Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR. Since joining NPR in 1992, Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is currently focused on the eponymous series, "Joe's Big Idea." Stories in the series explore the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors.

Palca began his journalism career in television in 1982, working as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC. In 1986, he left television for a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first as the Washington news editor for Nature, and then as a senior correspondent forScience Magazine.

In October 2009, Palca took a six-month leave from NPR to become science writer in residence at the Huntington Library and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Palca has won numerous awards, including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers, the American Chemical Society James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize, and the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Writing.

With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).

He comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where he worked on human sleep physiology.

Researchers in Switzerland say they've solved a nearly 100-year-old astronomical mystery by discovering what's in the wispy cloud of gas that floats in the space between the stars. Astronomers have known since 1922 that there was some invisible substance in between the stars. That's the year a young astronomy graduate student named Mary Lea Heger (who later became Mary Lea Shane ) reported that something was absorbing specific frequencies of light coming from distant stars. Figuring out what...

Scientists are reporting progress in the fight against a parasite that's a major cause of diarrheal disease in the developing world. To make progress against any microbial disease, scientists usually try to find ways to tinker with the microbe's genes, looking for weak spots that could be exploited with drugs. But tinkering with the genes of Cryptosporidium parvum has been difficult, if not completely impossible. No one has been able to figure out how to apply the standard tools of molecular...

A small company in California is hoping to make a big splash by providing detailed flood maps to homeowners and insurance companies. And to do that, the company is using one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The company is called Katrisk , based in Berkeley, Calif. Hydrologist and computer modeler Dag Lohmann is one of the company's founders. He says the flood maps the Federal Emergency Management Agency already produces will tell you how prone a particular area is to flooding. But...

You get a voicemail message from a friend. Her voice sounds a little ... weird. Like a chipmunk who had too much to drink. After her message, you're told you can push a button on the phone and hear another kind of message: say, job listings in your neighborhood or tips on how to stop the spread of Ebola. That's how a new game called Polly works. It was designed by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University to help get useful information to people with little or no reading skills. Polly...

Shrinivas Kulkarni, an astronomy and planetary science professor at the California Institute of Technology, is a serious astronomer. But not too serious. "We astronomers are supposed to say, 'We wonder about the stars and we really want to think about it,' " says Kulkarni — in other words, think deep thoughts. But he says that's not really the way it is. "Many scientists, I think, secretly are what I call 'boys with toys,' " he says. "I really like playing around with telescopes. It's just...

Using telescopes in Hawaii and California, astronomers have found two super-Earth-size planets orbiting a star a mere 54 light-years away. This brings to three the total number of exoplanets around the star HD 7924. The discovery is important for two reasons. NASA's Kepler telescope has shown that giant rocky planets orbiting close to their stars are fairly common for distant stars. The new finding confirms that such planets exist around local stars, as well. It also confirms the value of the...

The Hubble Space Telescope this week celebrates 25 years in Earth's orbit. In that time the telescope has studied distant galaxies, star nurseries, planets in our solar system and planets orbiting other stars. But, even with all that, you could argue that the astronomer for whom the telescope is named made even more important discoveries — with far less sophisticated equipment. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble was working with the 100-inch Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson, just outside Los Angeles....

A promi s ing technique for making brain tumors glow so they'll be easier for surgeons to remove is now being tested in cancer patients. Eighteen months ago, Shots first told readers about tumor paint , an experimental substance derived from scorpion venom. Inject tumor paint into a patient's vein, and it will actually cross the blood-brain barrier and find its way to a brain tumor. Shine near-infrared light on a tumor coated with tumor paint, and the tumor will glow. The main architect of...

Scientists in California are hoping to use your smart phone to solve a cosmic mystery. They're developing an app to turn your phone into a cosmic ray detector. If enough people install the app, the scientists think they'll be able to figure out once and for all what's producing the very energetic cosmic rays that occasionally hit the Earth. The project is the brainchild of physicists Daniel Whiteson at the University of California, Irvine, and his buddy Michael Mulhearn at the University of...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5kml7Fb17o A decade ago, physicist Robert Davies wasn't all that interested in Earth's climate. His field was quantum optics. But while he was working at the University of Oxford in England, he became intrigued by what was going on at Oxford's Environmental Change Institute , just down the road from his lab. Davies started going to seminars at the Institute, and was taken aback, he says, by "the broad gap between what science understands about climate change,...

A team of Indian physicists has made a mathematical model that purports to explain why ants don't have traffic jams. NPR's Joe Palca explains as part of his series, Joe's Big Idea. This story originally aired on Morning Edition on January 19, 2015. Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. Transcript ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: Traffic is a fact of modern life. Cars, plus more cars, plus trucks and there you are creeping along wondering why you're not going any faster, but of...

Could studying ants reveal clues to reducing highway traffic jams? Physicist Apoorva Nagar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology thinks the answer is yes. Nagar says he got interested in the topic when he came across a study by German and Indian researchers showing that ants running along a path were able to maintain a steady speed even when there were a large number of ants on the path. Nagar says there are three main reasons ants don't jam up. No. 1, ants don't have egos....

NASA is building a new space telescope with astounding capabilities . The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018, will replace the aging Hubble Space Telescope and will provide unprecedented views of the first galaxies to form in the early universe. It might even offer the first clear glimpse of an Earth-like planet orbiting a distant star. But there's a problem with the James Webb telescope: It's expensive. Very expensive — $8 billion expensive. So NASA has been looking for...

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. Transcript RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST: Science is all about collaborations. But there is new evidence that some collaborations may be more beneficial than others. Turns out when scientists collaborate internationally, they are more likely to have an impact on science than purely domestic collaborations. And the new evidence itself comes from an interesting and unexpected collaboration, as NPR's Joe Palca discovered when he dug into the...

The search for the massive star explosions called supernovae is about to get a big boost. Astronomers at Caltech in Pasadena are building a new camera that will let them survey the entire night sky in three nights. The problem with looking for supernovae is you can't really be sure when and where to look for them. Most telescope cameras can only capture a small patch of sky at a time. But the new camera, to be mounted on a telescope at the Palomar Observatory , has a much larger field of view...

There's a project in the neighborhood of Harlem in New York that has a through-the-looking-glass quality. An organization called City Health Works is trying to bring an African model of health care delivery to the United States. Usually it works the other way around. If City Health Works' approach is successful, it could help change the way chronic diseases are managed in poverty-stricken communities, where people suffer disproportionately from HIV/AIDS, obesity and diabetes. One of the...

People who grow tomatoes want varieties that produce as much saleable crop as possible. People who eat tomatoes are less interested in yield, and more in taste. The tension between taste and yield can get pretty intense. What's a poor tomato plant to do? Enter Zach Lippman , a plant geneticist from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. "Our interest is in how we can boost productivity, yield, fruit production, without compromising any of the fruit quality traits such as size and flavor,"...

There's now free software for your iPhone that lets you check for early signs of certain eye diseases. The idea for the app comes from a Baylor University chemist named Bryan Shaw . We introduced you to Shaw late last year. Shaw's son Noah was born with a rare form of eye cancer known as retinoblastoma . Shaw saw signs of his son's cancer when the baby was just 12 days old; there was a white reflection coming from Noah's eyes in flash pictures taken with the family's digital camera. The flash...

Whether they admit it or not, many (if not most) scientists secretly hope to get a call in October informing them they've won a Nobel Prize. But I've talked to a lot of Nobel laureates, and they are unanimous on one point: None of them pursued a research topic with the intention of winning the prize. That's certainly true for Jennifer Doudna . She hasn't won a Nobel Prize, but many are whispering that she's in line to win one for her work on something called CRISPR/Cas9 — a tool for editing...

A carnivorous plant has inspired an invention that may turn out to be a medical lifesaver. Nepenthes, also known as tropical pitcher plants or monkey cups, produce a superslippery surface that causes unfortunate insects that climb into the plant to slide to their doom. Scientists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering wondered if they could find a way to mimic that surface to solve a problem in medicine. The medical problem is blood clots. Whenever blood flows over...